Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Trademarks

Minor consolidation merge?

Resolved

 – Clarified in situ at MOS:BIOEXCEPT, instead of merged here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:10, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

A bit about individuals' names with unusual stylizations is buried at WP:Manual of Style/Biography#Initials, with examples like k.d. lang and CCH Pounder. I think this should be merged into MOS:TM, with a cross-reference left behind, instead of making people hunt it down over there (especially since the lang example involves stylization other than initials anwyay). MOS:TM is already providing at least one individual example, Deadmau5, anyway. So this is kind of verging on a WP:POLICYFORK, other than the advice not actually being contradictory.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:18, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Are the stylized names of people treated identically to those of organizations? I had the feeling we gave humans slightly more leeway than human inventions.

If equivalent, then sure, consolidation makes sense, but it might be nice to make it clearer that what we are addressing at this page is stylization of names, not trademark itself (an issue that I think has brought confusion itself in the past). And at that point, we could certainly speak further to titles of published works. — HTGS (talk) 04:16, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

They are treated the same, from the perspective of the general rule being applied: we don't use an unusual style like k.d. lang (which is both lowercased and with unspaced initials) or like Toys "R" Us (which has peculiar punctuation) unless a very strong majority of independent reliable sources consistently use it. But there is observably a trend (sympathy-based and strongly influenced by the rise of identity politics), to accept a lower estimated percentage of source usage (maybe 75% or so) in favor of an unusual individual name style than a corporate one (maybe 90+%). Otherwise our article title would be K. D. Lang by now, because source usage definitely is not more than about 75% using "k.d. lang", and my observations suggest that the rate of its use by independent writers, especially outside the entertainment press, is actually going down over the last decade.

I just had a month-long debate on my talk page with someone intent on seeing Wikipedia mandatorily follow the style preferred by the name owner, no matter what, corporate or otherwise; various hints strongly suggest that this person wants to conflate personal and corporate naming in a way that generates sympathy for his position by harping on personal names in particular and using them as a wedge to gain traction on corporate ones. So, I'm now skeptical about doing this micro-merge at all. It would be better to just juggle the material in MOS:BIO to not be confusingly stuck in the Initials section, and to use cross-references between the guidelines. PS: Titles of works has its own entire MoS page: MOS:TITLES, though cross-referencing to make it easier to find is probably a good idea.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 , 09:54, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

What I did instead, as part of a broader overhaul of messiness at MOS:BIO, is gather the scattered, hard-to-find, and sometimes sectionally miscategorized exception-related material there into a new section, at MOS:BIOEXCEPT, along with some additional real examples. Because the MOS:BIO material has a specific line-item about an individual subject's personal declaration and use of a name (grounded in identity politics, especially LGBT+ matters), but nothing like it is applicable to MOS:TM rules about commercial trademarks, this material basically cannot be merged here after all (or, strictly speaking, someone could try it, but the result would be very confusing, and would get reverted). I had honestly forgotten about that sentence in MOS:BIO, or I would never have suggested a merge in the first place. Clear cross-referencing is a much better solution, and has now been implemented between both guidelines at the pertinent places (plus improved cross-referencing to other guidelines like MOS:TITLES, as suggested above). PS: As for HTGS's comment about "stylization of names, not trademark itself", that should already be adequately covered by MOS:TM's lead, which makes it clear that it applies to things that are similar to trademarks even if they are not legally exactly trademarks, and this was improved upon in clarity last month.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:10, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

MOS:TM#Lead section

This was refactored out of a thread about MOS:BIO and MOS:TM cross-referencing or potential rule-merging, where this was not on-topic.

There are many problems with the guidance "Regardless of the page title, the lead sentence of an article on a company or other organization should normally begin with its full legal name (the current one or, if defunct, the final one)"

• Firstly there are far more many Trademarks referring to goods and services than "an article on a company or other organization"
• Secondly the lead sentence on an article might not start with the full legal name especially if there are multiple products or services under a singular topic like a product line or even the organization.
• Thirdly there are instances where "its full legal name" "the current one" or "the final one" is bad advice particularly with the ongoing discussion about Twitter. It is not currently "the current one" or even "the final one" and to the extent that it might be split there will still be a page about the historic twitter before it was acquired and transmigrated.
• This new Trademark guideline section is full of so many incorrect statements that I would feel strongly enough to revert its addition and remove it in its entirety. But I do not like edit warring and I am going to assume good faith that the editor who changed this will be willing to make further changes in order to accomodate the dilemmas that I have politely raised. Jorahm (talk) 18:11, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

@Jorahm: To run down these in the same order:

• First: Everyone knows that. There does not appear to be any recurrent confusion or disputation about how to write the lead sentence on a product or service with a trademarked name, so there is no reason for MoS to address it (see: MOS:BLOAT).
• Second: Again, this is not about products or services. To the extent that a company article might not start with the company's present legal name for some exceptional reason, that's why it says "normally". Cf. WP:P&G: "Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply."
  • Your side point about split articles is immaterial. If an article about a subsidiary or a former business entity that was merged exists as its own article, then the entitity that is the subject of that article is the subject. Names that only pertain to some other larger entity that owns or owned the smaller one have no bearing on how to write the name in lead sentence on the smaller entity. I'm skeptical anyone would ever possibly be confused about that.
• Third: This is again already covered by "normally". But Twitter is not about a company but a service; the company article is X Corp.. So, there is no company-legal-name issue at Twitter whatsoever. The real disputation there appears to be a WP:COMMONNAME policy question of whether and when to move the article to X (social network). It's just not an MoS matter.
• You haven't actually made a case that anything is wrong with the summary material in this section at all. You seem to be looking for (and upset not to find) a rule you can wield in an article-title dispute, and perhaps in a lead-writing dispute about how exactly to refer to a service that has changed names (completely, not just a stylization tweak or a swap of corporation-type designators). But there isn't any such MoS rule to wield, and such a matter is really going to pretty much always come down to coverage in current independent sources. Sources are what determine the WP:COMMONNAME analysis (and WP:OFFICALNAMEs don't count for much in it), meanwhile COMMONNAME determines the article title, and the article title usually tells us what to put first in the lead sentence.

What this section is actually about is ususally (not mandatorily) giving the full name of a company or other organization in the lead sentence even if the article title is shorter, just as we do with invididuals' names. It is not a "new rule" imposing anything, it's simply an observation of actual practice. E.g. PBS begins with "The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) ..." just like D. H. Lawrence begins with "David Herbert Lawrence ...", and Sony begins with "Sony Group Corporation ...", just as Bob Odenkirk begins with "Robert John Odenkirk ...". There is nothing controversial about this and it really doesn't have anything to do with product/service names.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:55, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

I have learned that people on Wikipedia throw accusations about things they themselves are doing. You asked to move Disney to The Walt Disney Company and was rejected completely by every other editor replying. Talk:The_Walt_Disney_Company#Requested_move_11_December_2023. You accuse me of being upset but you seem far more defensive about the rejection and by your own standards of evidence should we discuss whether you are are looking for a rule to wield (and upset that you could not find one) in your own discussions?

Let us just WP:AGF because it seems like we actually agree on the things that "everybody knows that" and just need to make this more clear. This is a page about all trademarks including products and services and not just corporate names so the page should reflect that. I will attempt to modify it based on the elements that you appear to agree on and let us try to find a constructive way forward. Jorahm (talk) 18:06, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Well, your attempt to do that actually made it read to be more about company names only, but I think the compromise version discussed below will resolve it. Disney: it was the other way around; I proposed moving the long-named article to the short name. Yes, the RM proposal was rejected; I've never said otherwise. And there is no "defensive" (or other) discussion of Disney here. You seem to be trying to spin my comments on the matter somewhere else as a means of implying something about me and about what I'm saying here, which doesn't seem to suit your "Let us just AGF" message. But whatever.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:44, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

@Jorahm: In light of revisions worked out below, it might be worth re-reviewing the original stuff above (in the same "Firstly," etc. order) to make sure this is entirely resolved:

1. The section (now named "Multiple, changed, and former names") has an opener about using in the lead sentence the full legal name of the company or other organization (which would include a subsidiary or a parent holding company with its own article, a nonprofit/not-for-profit/NGO, a university, a partnership, a state-owned enterprise, whatever; it's not limited to commercial corporations). This line-item is intentionally specific to organizations. Products/services don't have "legal names" with official corporation-type designators and other stuff we need to account for, so there is no reason to mention anything but organizations in that guideline sentence. (One of the later sentences, about former names and their lead pertinence was over-specific to entities; this has been fixed.)
2. It's hard to parse the second item you raised, but if the article is about the company, then the full-legal-name provision applies (see, e.g., Meta Platforms and its lead sentence, starting with "Meta Platforms, Inc."; this is a perfect example of using the WP:COMMONNAME as the title and as the name we use in most running text, but using the full legal company name in the lead sentence of its own article). If it's about a service then this legal-name stuff simply isn't applicable, thus the Meta Platforms service Facebook and our article on it. Even when the company was called "Facebook, Inc.", that was a separate article (since moved to the Meta Platforms one).

   A complication could theoretically arise if a service/product and the company owning it were at the same article. Exactly how to write the lead would vary on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether the focus was more on the company or on its offering (usually the latter, or there would be separate articles; companies are not generally notable simply for existing, but for what they produce/do). Even in such a case, however, the first mention of the company at an article doubling as a service-and-company article would have the full name of the company. The guideline doesn't explicitly state this. It could, with something like: When a service/product and the company producing it share an article and the lead sentence is about the former, give the full legal name of the company at first mention. But if there's no evidence anyone is confused on this point, then adding it would be WP:MOSBLOAT and we don't need to do it. It's already implicit. That is, trying to deny use of the full company at first mention simply because it was in the article's second sentence instead of first, despite the obvious intent of the MOS:TM material that the full company name is encyclopedically crucial, would be patently a bunch of ridiculous WP:WIKILAWYERing and no one would buy it. That said, the sky would not fall if we added that caveat. It's just not a good idea to add a line-item to MoS, which is already over-long and too-complicated, unless there's a proven need for it to resolve recurrent editorial strife. Cf. also WP:AJR: we do not need to add rules that address one-off brainfarts by some random individual if the community already rejects their brainfarting. :-)

3. The third part seems to have conflated several different kinds of issues. Using the Twitter example, the article is currently Twitter, and one would expect it to change some time this year, after more sources are writing "X (formerly Twitter)" or just "X" than are writing "Twitter (now X)" or just "Twitter". (It certainly doesn't help the cause of fans of the move that if you go to https://x.com or https://about.x.com they still redirect to https://twitter.com and https://about.twitter.com! The company is not anywhere near consistent with or insistent on its own branding ID change, yet.) It's a service, not a company, so the legal-name provision isn't applicable. The company article is X Corp. (the "official" name they use; in theory it could have been at X (company), but that is a disambiguation page, probably for good reason, so usurping it would be a debate, and it's easier to just use their official name, since it's also the WP:COMMONNAME anyway.) They appear as X Corp. in the lead, and this is compliant with the full-official-name guideline in TM (though in this case it coincidentally is also the page title). I can't find any reliable sources that have this company name with an additional corporation-type identifier tacked onto it, such as "Incorporated", "Inc.", "LLP", etc. Nor does its official or common name appear to be the longer "X Corporation". (One of the related holding companies, X Corp. Solutions, Inc., does have such a designator, and if it warranted its own article it would be at X Corp. Solutions and its lead would start with "X Corp. Solutions, Inc." I've raised this and other holding-company names at Talk:X Corp.) In short, there's not a problem to resolve at such articles, and the guideline isn't broken (and wasn't even before the recent tweaks, though it is clearer now than it was). Anyway, it is possible that there would be an article on the "historical Twitter", perhaps not, but that won't have any implications for any of this, since it was a service not a corporate entity.
4. (Unnumbered in your original.) There aren't any demonstrable "incorrect statements" in the guideline (before or now).

Hopefully this is all resolved.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:50, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

"Lead section" changes

I mean the section titled "Lead section", not the actual lead section of the guideline. Jorahm made undiscussed and quite substantive changes to it [1]. Rather than just revert, I applied the WP:PRESERVE principle and tried to integrate [2] what was salvageable from that edit into the material already present (including a line Jorahm deleted without any rationale). Here's a combined diff showing the before-and-after change (from original wording to new blended wording) [3]. Anyone should feel free to just revert to the previous stable version for further discussion of any such changes if the compromise attempt doesn't seem viable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:27, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

The changes read much much better and thank you for working towards a constructive version with viable writing. I have a minor criticism which is that the section is titled "lead section" but is really just about how to cover organizations with multiple legal names. You can see it is already confusing just by how you started this thread but the essential reason why this is a little oddity is because this entire guideline page is really about trademarks in all cases which in many cases refers to products and services and not just companies or organizations. This would be easy to fix with a different title talking about companies who change their names or some other similar title for the section. Another small criticism is that the section does not properly emphasize the guidance at WP:NAMECHANGE but it at least mentions it and that is good enough I guess. Jorahm (talk) 17:51, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@Jorahm: Poring over it after some rest, I agree that the section in question had come to cover more than lead material strictly and is focused on names of various types (not just legal ones, though). Meawhile, the MOS:TMSTYLE section also covers some lead material. And I didn't actually see a WP:NAMECHANGE ref explicitly in there, but it is clearly pertinent to cross-reference and to summarize as it applies here. And there was one line in there that was written as if only applicable to companies when it's not. I think this will resolve it all, assuming no one has some kind of objection to it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:34, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

MOS:TMSTYLE clarification

The text in that section was getting very palimpsestuous and confused. It read (footnote elided):

In the article about a trademark, it is conventional to give the normal English spelling in the lead section, followed by a note, such as "(stylized as ...)" (or "(stylised as ...)" depending on the article's variety of English), with the stylized version (which may include simple stylization, like capitalization changes, decorative characters, or superscripting, but not colorization, attempts to emulate font choices, or other elaborate effects), then resume using an alternative that follows the usual rules of spelling and punctuation, for the remainder of the article. In other articles that mention the subject, use only the normal English spelling, not the stylization.

I've revised this to:

In the article about a trademark, give the version that follows the usual rules of spelling and punctuation, boldfaced in the lead sentence. Follow this with a note, such as "(stylized as ...)" or "(stylised as ...)", depending on the article's variety of English, with the stylization if one exists and is significantly different. It should also be in bold, and may include simple styling, like capitalization changes, decorative characters, or superscripting (but not colorization, attempts to emulate font choices, or other elaborate effects). Then resume using the normal English spelling for the remainder of the article. In other articles that mention the subject, use only the normal English spelling, not the stylization.

This patches up the following:

• Confusion of the lead section (which might be 10 paragraphs) with the lead sentence; we obviously mean the latter.
• Using a shorthand "the normal English spelling" and only explaining what this means later, intead of using the clearer wording the first time.
• Confusedly implying, with strange "an alternative" wording, that we're talking about three different versions, when of course only two are at issue.
• Failure to agree with MOS:BOLDLEAD and MOS:BOLDSYN.
• Incorrect implication that a "(stylized as ...)" is mandatory, instead of only to be used when there's a significant difference (e.g., Joe's, following MOS:CURLY, is not significantly different from Joe’s, and we need no parenthetical in the article about it).
• Pointless blather like "it is conventional to".
• Run-on construction that needed splitting up into separate sentences.
• Unnecessary parentheses.

I don't think anything about this would be controversial, but let me know if I've had a mental lapse of some kind.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:35, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Partially capped abbreviations with multiple letters from a word

Do MOS:TM or MOS:ABBR or other MoS sections have any examples like "YAStrA" as an abbreviation for "yet another strange abbreviation"? Would the MOS prefer something like "YASTRA" or "Yastra" for that, if we assume sources are mixed? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

The first example article I thought of, ExCeL London (from Exhibition Centre London) consistently uses the mixed capitalisation, looking at a random selection of independent sources cited in the article there is an approximate 50/50 split between "ExCeL" and "Excel", there were no instances of "EXCEL". The article is tagged as needing cleanup for (among other things) being written like an advert though so it's best not to treat that as definitive.

The only featured article I spotted of potential relevance is AdS/CFT correspondence but that's from anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence (so not quite the same) and it seems clear that that is the universally agreed correct capitalisation, so also of limited use to this question.

The Camel case article led me to National Novel Writing Month, which consistently uses capitalises the abbreviation as "NaNoWriMo", but so do pretty much all the sources (one of the hits on the first six pages of a google search for "nanowrimo" used it in all lowercase, everything else used the mixed case).

This is too small a sample to give a definite answer beyond use mixed capitalisation if that's what sources consistently do. Thryduulf (talk) 12:42, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

One that came to my mind is IMDb, but as far as I know, sources use that form (and that site itself dominates the search results rather than independent sources). I want to know what should happen if the sources are mixed. The topic that caused me to ask the question is ULTra (rapid transit), but I prefer to ask the more general question rather than focus on that one topic. After further digging, that one has its own specific evolution (see Talk:ULTra (rapid transit)). —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:02, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I had an idea and put a list of some possibly relevant titles in my sandbox (all those in the 23 November article titles dumb that start with the letter case pattern AAaAa and contain no spaces). I've started to look through the list, most are redirects that are completely irrelevant that I'm just deleting to keep the list manageable (e.g. ASoIaF → A Song of Ice and Fire) and I've made notes on the others. So far I've not found any where the sources are inconsistent, but please feel free to use and edit that page. Thryduulf (talk) 01:40, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

@BarrelProof I've looked at some more from that list and found exactly one article that is directly relevant - FLiBe. The article consistently uses that capitalisation, but sources are mixed with "Flibe" being more common among the first few sources. I didn't find any examples of "FLIBE" or "flibe". The article is rated start class and has a cleanup tag for bare URLs so it seems unlikely this should be regarded as definitely conforming to the manual of style. Thryduulf (talk) 15:34, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

It sounds like ExCeL London is the best example so far. With the independent sources being mixed between "ExCeL" and "Excel", would Wikipedia have a preference? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:17, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

My gut feeling is that where there is a clear predominance in independent reliable sources for one form we should use that, where usage is more mixed than that we should probably prefer whatever the official styling is. Where there isn't an official styling or it's unclear what it is, then treat it like we do Engvar issues - i.e. any form consistently found in reliable sources is fine, but be consistent within an article and don't change without good reason. Where usage is mixed in reliable sources or where our article differs from the official stylisation we should default to noting the multiple forms in the lead. Obviously we should not be using a form not found in reliable sources (e.g. EXCEL, FLIBE). Thryduulf (talk) 18:40, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Y —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 00:27, 21 March 2024 (UTC)